This coming Saturday, well over 100,000 hopeful and aspiring financiers will sit down in desks all across the world and attempt to pass one of the three levels of the Chartered Financial Analyst (CFA) exam.

Some children as well as grownups, who have fragile dispositions, merely crumble when the going gets tough. But the Lebanon/Syria paradigm that Taleb and Treverton point to is instructive both in terms of nation and personality building.

On my trip across the country last summer -- having fled the news desk for a life of promoting kale, veterans, and kale-growing veterans -- I carried what I fervently believe to be a very important book, Nassim Nicholas Taleb's Antifragile.

It's an exercise in futility to try to hypothesize what effect antidepressants would have had on long-gone writers like Poe and Baudelaire. Whether you function or not is a more pertinent question than whether or not antidepressants or substance abuse "silences the soul."

Americans pay $80 billion a year for intelligence agencies. But why does society pay analysts phenomenal sums of money for systematically failing to predict the events that impact our lives most deeply?

Wall Street is our secular religion. As with more traditional beliefs, faith trumps reason. That explains our willful blindness to the obvious scam, the fantastic story told to us by billionaire bankers.

AIG's CEO prefers not to say who has our money. Same with the Fed. Same with Bank of America's CEO who prefers to go to court instead of saying who got bonuses. It's time to call in all the knowable unknowns.